timeforsnipersopinion

[timeforsnipersopinion]

has this been done

(inspired by this post)

[timeforsnipersopinion]

Terra Ignota worldbuilding is so weird and so densely packed that I have almost immediately given up on trying to evaluate any of it based on ethics or functionality, I have stopped trying to figure out if a given aspect of the storyworld is there because the author thinks it’s good, or because the author wants to show that it’s bad, or because the author thought it would be funny/interesting/horrible.

But I still kind of wonder about livedolls. Sniper is a key character in the story and its personal arc is in large part about trauma, about retaining its personhood in a situation that sought to turn it into an object, and about recovering afterwards. The text sort of implies that Sniper was already unwell before the specific traumatising event happened, because like everyone in the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash, it is simultaneously a hero, a terrorist and a very fucked up pseudo child soldier. But the text doesn’t really engage with Sniper’s past as a child star: it started modelling for livedolls as a kid, and it never stopped. Millions of people own accurate life-size replicas of Sniper, posable, pliable, warm but unresponsive livedolls. People cuddle with and talk to and have strong feelings about their livedolls, but of course the feelings are not about Sniper, but about whatever they want to project on Sniper. And Sniper the person must not ruin the illusion of the perfectly blank, perfectly friendly doll. Sniper must be sweet and fun and nonthreatening. Sniper must always become whatever its fans need it to be. Sniper will become a literal fuckdoll if that is what they need. We could just take Sniper at its word that it enjoys its extreme parasocial celebrity status, that it experiences its fans’ loyalty as a genuine human connection, and isn’t like, deeply hurt and warped by any of it, but… come on. Sniper was clearly depersonalised and super fucked in the head even before Julia got to it. It had a secret worry that it might wake up as, or be interchanged with, one of its many livedoll copies, and secretly had a notch filed in one of its teeth to be able to tell if it really was the real Sniper. Sane and well people don’t worry about shit like that!

Basically I wonder if during its recovery from the kidnapping ordeal, it can also gain a better understanding of the trauma that has been ongoing since it was a toddler. I wonder if its choice to switch to it/its pronouns wasn’t just a reflection of its gender identity, but an attempt on its part to reclaim, and somehow process, its self-objectification.

[timeforsnipersopinion]

bryar kosala and vivien ancelet are truly a microcosm of what reading too like the lightning feels like, in any other book the two world leaders who are married and whom everyone thinks is cheating on each other with a third shadow world leader and the author makes sure to always mention them keeping their wedding rings on while cheating only it turns out in the end the third shadow world leader was one of them all along so they weren't cheating after all would be a protagonist tier couple and in the terra ignota series they're just side characters in a cast of other characters who all have equally insane backstories

[timeforsnipersopinion]

Surprisingly I don't think there was any discussion in Terra Ignota of how incest kinks have developed in 2454

[timeforsnipersopinion]

Why do we need a church, any church? The usual answer is that we are social beings and we do things together; therefore we worship together. That is a good answer unless you rephrase the question. Is religion like sex or like politics? Sex is completely natural, utterly human, and profoundly holy. Yet, despite being social beings, we usually do not congregate to make love together at some designated place and time. Why is religion not like sex, something terribly important, socially necessary, but privately performed? Religion could, after all, be passed on and performed within the family, in the privacy of the home, as the supreme family value. We have a bedroom and a bathroom—why couldn’t we have a godroom?

[timeforsnipersopinion]

mycroft: why are you bringing up the odyssey right after my own personal odyssey

9a: don’t worry about it kitten

mycroft: okay. yaaay

[timeforsnipersopinion]

ojiro cardigan sniper and some guy have arrived at the met gala!

bonus:

[timeforsnipersopinion]

barbie meme :3

[timeforsnipersopinion]

i thought the "miku from your country" trend was cute, so of course i had to make mikus for a few of my favorite sci-fi "not a country, but not not a country" political entities

[timeforsnipersopinion]

they are Cancelling me for dealing with my grief as best i can . also for the vicious war Crimes

[timeforsnipersopinion]

Terra Ignota is a comedy, exhibit #47283:

"Some old criminal friends of mine and Mycroft's. /.../ They'll take very good care of you, because they know if they don't I'll drag them into an alley, hack chunks off them, and eat them while they're still alive."

"I like that you're honest. Most people wouldn't say stuff like that in front of a kid."

[timeforsnipersopinion]

fuck it, terra ignota favs (as of ss) while Im waiting

I dont have my copies on hand because Im at panera so soz if these arent canon compliant Im going off memory and vibes

[timeforsnipersopinion]

Mycroft is like, don't worry about these numbers, dear reader, just focus on the vibes. Which are bad, very bad. But also here's the table, just in case you do worry about the numbers. What a goddamn nerd.

An actual table of made up stats in a made up world:

Mad respect to Ada Palmer for this. Forget fantasy maps, where are my sci-fi multivariate regression models? Where are my scatterplots? (Men who are now bad at writing women would invariably include violin plots and we would shame them for it). What a world would that be.

[timeforsnipersopinion]

new alignment chart just dropped

[timeforsnipersopinion]

i think despite all of his heinous, heinous crimes, to me the worst thing mycroft canner has done is consistently refer to his penis as a member

[timeforsnipersopinion]

Some larger point regarding the theme of The will to battle and Mycroft's trauma:

The way that the book is about the time of the war is most obviously expressed by the fact that it has dates for when things happen and when Mycroft writes them down. It serves to create an interesting feeling of escalation, as we can see the past rapidly catching up with him, but it remains, for the entire book, his past.

I think in this regards, it is interesting that we can note an obvious aggravation of Mycroft's mental state compared to the two other books. He mentions ghosts a lot more, and the reader's interventions have turned into full dialogues with other hallucinations sometimes not even involving mycroft at all; he also spends a much higher number of scenes reacting suddenly and violently to conversations he is not invited in.

Some of it is clearly grief - there's explicit mention of the fact that people are actively preventing him from killing himself after Bridger's death. There is a lot of crying happening about Bridger, and some more happening specifically around Achilles and their shared Greek descent, that feels like a desperate projection of kinship.

I'm still reading this like a historian, though - and I continue to be encouraged by the text's finally plain admission that Mycroft Canner was chosen as the historian here because his word cannot be legally binding. Mycroft Canner was a first witness of most of what he describes in the series, but still until the last book, he writes from a distance, after the events happened. In fact he writes the first two books after Bridger's death as well, and we don't see him lose himself with grief in these ones.

In fact the real difference with this book specifically, is that he writes it explicitly after the war was officially declared: he already knows when the will to battle turns into battle.

And so I think a really interesting way this book deals with time, is that it manifests it in the text by having Mycroft be a lot less mentally stable in his retellings. Potentially, projecting schizophrenia back onto past events, as he is in his own present already operating on the kind of urgency, neglected basic needs, extreme stress, piling trauma and horrible circumstances that are described more bluntly in Perhaps the stars.

[timeforsnipersopinion]

Man i wish my live-in friend group weren't all members of a Japanese car-making conglomerate, I need someone to speak Latin with